Holly and Hoarfrost
by Shu of the Wind
Summary: FrostParr. She's not good at believing in things anymore. That doesn't mean they don't exist. In progress. Happy holidays!
1. The First Night

**Holly and Hoarfrost  
by Shu of the Wind**

* * *

**The First Night**

She doesn't believe in fairy tales.

Oh, she used to. Violet Parr used to be the most gullible girl on the face of the planet. She believed in all of it—Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny. She even believed in the Boogeyman. Then she wound up in fourth grade, when all the kids started to stop believing, and even though she threatened to stay up all night on Christmas Eve, and _prove _that Santa was real, her friends laughed at her, called her a kid, and went back to giggling about boys.

Her parents would never let her stay up to catch Santa, either. Dash snuck into her room at midnight on Christmas Eve to tell her that Mom and Dad were downstairs wrapping more presents, and produces some of the tangerines that always end up in their stockings. "I found it under Mom and Dad's bed," he says, and chucks it at her, because he knows she loves tangerines. She catches it, and holds it between her hands, though suddenly she wants to fling it out of the window.

"Dash," she asks, as he's on his way out of the room. "You don't believe in Santa, do you?"

"No," he grins at her, "of course not. Nobody other than kindergartners believes in _Santa_. Silly old Violet," he adds, laughing, and then with a whisper of wind he vanishes down the hall to his room.

Violet never tells anyone, but she cries herself to sleep that night. She stares out at the window and hopes, and prays, begging: _Please. Please leave me something. Please tell me you're real._

But even the note that ends up on her pillow the next morning looks disturbingly familiar, like her parents wrote it. She leaves it in the bottom of her desk drawer, and gives her mother the tangerine.

She doesn't realize until many years later that it was that Christmas morning, that day, when she first realized that she could make herself invisible. She'd been making force fields, on and off, since she'd been younger than Jack-Jack, but invisibility had never been something she'd considered until she'd woken up one morning to be nothing. It seemed a very safe thing to be.

* * *

She's sixteen and gloomy when she starts to think about believing again. She's been stuck watching a whiny Jack-Jack all morning, watching him turn his hands into flame and back into flesh again, while Dash and her parents scuttle off to do elfy things. That's what her mom calls Christmas shopping, and it's always made her smile, but now she's a teenager stuck watching her four-year-old superhero prodigy of a brother while the Christmas tree blinks obnoxiously the corner of the room. She has a headache—probably from a full day of dealing with Jack-Jack all on her own—and the lights are driving her mad.

Jack-Jack makes a rude noise. When that doesn't get her attention, he tugs on her sleeve. "Vi, read a story to me."

"What story?" She's read all of them, twice by now, but there's no stopping Jack-Jack. He's insatiable. "Which one?"

"The one about the bunny."

The book about the Easter Bunny had been Dash's idea, and she can't help but curse him under her breath as she drags it out from under the huge pile of picture books that squats beside the couch. Jack-Jack curls up next to her, just a blonde-haired boy again, not an imp or a robot or a baby made of flame, and in spite of herself she smiles and tucks one arm around him. She loves her brothers, even though there are times when she could happily chuck them both out of a high-rise window, and Jack-Jack is probably her favorite of the two. Then she starts reading.

The story itself is fairly monotonous. She could probably recite it from memory by now. A little boy losing his way in a forest on an Easter egg hunt, only to follow a rabbit back home. It's a bit of a weird story to read around Christmastime, but it's Jack-Jack and she doesn't expect logic from a four-year-old. He startles her, though, when she reaches the part where the rabbit pops out of the bush. "He doesn't look like that."

"Who doesn't look like that, sweetheart?"

"The Easter bunny." Jack-Jack sounds like their mother; there's a hint of a lisp to his voice, but instead of making him sound silly, it just makes him adorable. When he gets older, she thinks, he'll get hell for it, but now he's just sweet. "He doesn't look like that at all."

Violet decides to humor him. After all, there's little else she can do, and she's bored anyway. "Then what does he look like?"

"Tall!" Jack-Jack throws his arms out so roughly that he almost topples off the couch. "Almost as tall as Daddy. And all grey. He has…those thingies."

"What thingies?"

He mimics throwing something. "You throw them and they come back."

She wonders who's been telling him tales. Jack-Jack reminds her of herself, back when she'd been little. Gullible enough to believe anything. "Boomerangs?"

"Yep!" He beams at her, showing off his missing teeth. "He has two of them and he threw them out my window and they went _whoosh_!" This time he does fall off the couch, and she catches him by the back of his shirt, yanking him back up before he gives himself a nosebleed. "And he talks funny, too!"

"Really?" Privately, she makes a mental note to have a word with Dash. He's been telling Jack-Jack weird tales again, she's sure. "What'd he say?"

"He said that we do good things." Jack-Jack looks about theatrically and then whispers, though there's no one here but them. "That…the _Incredibles _do good things. And that there's nothing wrong with believing in things that you can't see."

"That's true." Violet has no issue with other people who believe. She's not bitter about the idea of believing, only irritated about her own childish stupidity. But Jack-Jack sits and looks at her for a moment, and she cocks her head at him. "What?"

"He said he felt sorry for you, Vi," says Jack-Jack, and she blinks. "He said that you used to believe too, and that you still could, if you wanted."

"Believe?"

"In Santa Claus."

"And the Easter Bunny too, I imagine," says Violet, but her joke isn't taken well. Jack-Jack seizes her hands and squeezes.

"Vi-o-_let_, don't be mean!" He's really a very smart four-year-old, she thinks, as he shakes her wrists. "He says the letter was real, even if you didn't want to read it. You should believe, too. He's really nice, not scary at all." He looks at the book again, and then wrinkles his nose. "And he doesn't look like _that_."

"So you've said," she replies, but she's shaking inside. She's never told Jack-Jack about the letter from her parents, the one they tried to pass off as a letter from Santa. It's possible he could have gone through her drawers to find out, but then again, she keeps that one locked, because her jewelry's inside. (She still doesn't know why she kept the letter. She's just never considered throwing it out.) She's about to ask Jack-Jack who told him about this Easter Bunny, but then Dad's car pulls up in the drive, and Jack-Jack goes running off to shriek at their mother about food and presents and Christmas and toys and every other thing that a four-year-old tells his mother after three or four hours apart.

Violet goes back upstairs to her room as soon as dinner's over, and unlocks her drawer. The letter sits under a box of earrings and a diary from when she was twelve and desperately in love with Tony Rydinger (a long-since lost cause, but not one she regrets). The paper is heavier than she remembers, like parchment, and when she tilts it, the ink glows like gold.

For the first time, she actually opens it, and spreads the letter wide. It's quite short, only a few lines, but the handwriting—now that she knows her parents' writing better—doesn't look that familiar after all.

_Dear Miss Parr,_

_I am sorry things have been hard on you lately, but I am sure that you are strong enough to get through it. You have been quite a spirited little girl, and have always made things very difficult to keep quiet!_

_Keep faith, little one. You are more powerful than you think you are. I can't wait to see you grown._

_Sincerely,_

_North_

She stares at it for a long moment. Then she shakes her head a few times, folds the letter back up, and settles it in its envelope. But it doesn't go back in the drawer. Instead, she puts it into the nearest book, less as a bookmark, more of a reminder.

She should ask her mother whose idea it was, between her parents, to give Santa Claus such a weird nickname.

* * *

The question flies out of her head for another year, though. Now she's seventeen, just broken it off with another boy—not Tony, though sometimes she wishes it was—and going through a bookshelf in preparation for packing up for college when the book with the letter literally falls into her lap. It's Christmas again, and she looks at the note for a few moments before taking it downstairs and showing it to her mother. Jack-Jack is off at a friend's house, and Dash is wandering around the way he usually does around Christmas time, dashing about, trying to find people who "need saving." She's not sure if he ever actually finds any, or if it's anything more than an excuse to wear the supersuit more often than necessary, but her parents don't complain, so neither does she.

"Mom," she says, and she watches her mother bustle around the kitchen. There's a bruise on Helen Parr's cheek that came from a fight they had last week; Violet's ribs are still creaking from it.

"Mm?"

"You remember that letter you gave me when I was little?"

"What?" Her mother turns down the radio, where Christmas music is blasting. "Vi, sweetie, what are you talking about?"

"You know, this." She waves the letter at her mom. "To tell me Santa Claus was real. You gave me a letter, remember?"

Her mother looks confused, still, so Violet offers the note. Helen looks even more confused—and slightly wary, too—when she unfolds the paper and reads the note before giving them both back to Violet.

"I'm sorry, sweetie, I don't think I ever did anything like this for you. Maybe you should ask your dad?"

Violet blinks. "I did. He told me to ask you."

"Hm." She turns back to her cream sauce. "Well, you know your dad. He might still be fibbing about it."

Violet nods, makes a noise that could be called "Yeah" in another language, and then hides upstairs again. She sits on the floor amongst the books, staring at the letter, for a good half-an-hour, trying to come up with reasons behind it. She could have misread her father, and he could really have been lying about not giving her the letter. She's much better at telling when someone's lying than her mother is, though, and she's positive that her dad wasn't lying about the letter. He'd really looked confused, just like her mom.

Dash she discounts immediately. He's bright, but not smart enough to forge a letter. Besides, his handwriting's too atrocious for something like this, and had been even worse all those years ago when it first showed up on her pillow. Jack-Jack hadn't even been born yet, so he's out, and there hadn't been any other family members around to do it. She can't remember her parents ever talking about siblings, she had no cousins, or aunts and uncles or anything. She'd never even met her grandparents.

So where had it come from?

_A baddie_. That's what logic tells her. _Someone who'd sneak into a kid's room in the middle of the night and trick them._

But if it had been one of her parents' many enemies, why go to such lengths to make her believe in something that didn't exist? Why not just snatch her out of her bed and make them come looking? She'd run into some villains with weird plots, sure, but nothing like what her mind was conjuring now.

Where, then? Not her parents, not Dash, not anyone else. Except….

_North?_

No. Santa Claus didn't exist. He wasn't real. _Isn't real, _she corrects herself, Santa Claus _isn't _real. Can't be real.

_Couldn't he?_

She puts a force field around the letter rather than touch it, clambering back up onto her bed. Outside it's snowing, and the flakes flicker down past the traffic lights, casting strange patterns on her window. It'll be frosty in the morning. Leaving the letter on her bedside table, she crawls up into her window-seat, draws her knees up against her chest, and tries to think. And for the first time in many years, she prays.

_Please_, she thinks. "Please," she says. "If you're real, please, tell me." She feels the tears well up in her eyes, at the thought of what a miracle it would be to have all her old beliefs back, the wonder of what a child saw in the world, only goodness and pureness and _happiness_. Not this villain-infested cesspool she lives in now. Not with all these worries and cares that she has now. Just…pure innocence. "If you're real, any of you, like Jack-Jack thinks, please tell me. If you're a super, or just…a spirit, or something, I don't care. Just…please tell me. If you're real. Please."

She doesn't expect a response. She sits there for a long time, and she's certain she's not going to get one. But when the wind rattles at her window, prying at her lock, she leaps off the window-seat and calls up a force field, a shimmering purple shield between her and whatever invisible thing is trying to get into her room. When the window blows open, she grabs a knick-knack off the nearest shelf and chucks it. She has good aim, and always has done; it's why she joined the softball team in junior high, the archery club in high school. The figurine hits nothing, but she swears she feels—_something_. Something's there, in the room. Something's with her.

"I know you're there," she says, and her voice doesn't quaver like it would have if she'd been thirteen and shy. She's fierce. She's Violet Parr. She's Miss Incredible. She doesn't get scared of ghosts in the dark anymore. "Come out, whoever you are. I'm not afraid of you."

There's nothing. The wind whistles again, and the window-seat creaks. Someone's there, she's certain. She's absolutely positive. Then a gust of wind hits her shields, blowing cold air against the glow, and she watches an invisible hand write out words in chips of ice.

_Jack Frost._

* * *

She doesn't see him instantly. It takes her a few hours and a lot of coffee before she can even consider believing it. But she sits with a force field up against her hands, like a desk, and watches him write in long streaks of frost that melt in the next breath. He's real, he says, and Santa Claus is real. _Nicholas St. North_, he writes, and then there's a little smiley face next to the name. The wind quivers as though someone is laughing. When she finally dares to bring up what Jack-Jack told her, about the Easter Bunny, another smiley face appears on her force field. It's the only hint that it might be true. That she's not dreaming.

Violet sits and waits for her parents to go to bed before heading downstairs to make coffee. She's certain she sees a shadow following hers, of a lanky boy with a staff in his hands, but when she turns around again it's gone, as though it never was. If this boy—because she thinks he's a boy, if his name and his wretchedly spiky handwriting are any indication—is real, like she thinks he might be, he might also be a super. He might be able to turn invisible, just like her. Only unlike her, he doesn't seem to be able to speak, or touch, anything other than her force field. But she sits at the dining table and drinks coffee, and wonders if she might be going crazy. It's not the weirdest thing that could happen to her, by super terms, anyway.

"If you're real," she says, and the frost on her force field makes a frowny face, and then another face, with the tongue sticking out. In spite of herself, she wants to laugh, but she holds it back. "_If _you're real," she repeats, firmly, "then I'm going to need proof, you know. I don't…believe. I'm not a kid, not like I used to be."

_Can't believe your eyes?_ The frost scripts out, and she scowls at the place where he might be, if she's not hallucinating.

"I haven't believed in Santa Claus since I was nine years old."

There's a long pause. Then another curl of frost. _Even if children don't believe in us, we don't stop believing in the children._

That pricks her. "I'm not a kid!"

_Nope._ Then a winky face. _You're still cute though._

She feels blood rush to her face. "I never heard of Jack Frost being a flirt."

_I can be. Along with a lot of other things._ There's another shift to the air, mocking this time. _What does it matter?_ Another long pause, so long this time that she thinks he's vanished, this dream of hers, back into the winds from which he came. She clenches her fingers tight around her coffee cup. Then the frost spirals forth again, a wonderful arcing pattern, and in it he scrapes words. _You can't see us unless you believe, Violet. It's the way it's always been._

"But you're a super, aren't you?" She asks. "Stop being invisible. It's not like I don't know how that feels."

_I'm not invisible because I want to be._ He underlines this. _I can't turn back unless you believe._

"That's stupid. It's not like you're a—a spirit, or something."

A long pause. That's her answer, she thinks, as she watches the opposite chair, where she thinks he might be, if he's even real. Ice flickers through the air. _We've been waiting for you to believe again._

"Why?" she whispers, and she can barely breathe as she waits for the answer.

_Because you never stopped_.

She looks at the words, watches them as they melt away. Her coffee goes suddenly cold in her hands. She doesn't care about that. Violet Parr closes her eyes, and thinks back to being a child. She thinks back to that terrible Christmas Eve, the one where she sobbed herself to sleep and woke up with a mysterious letter on her pillow. She thinks of her brother, Dash, and his utter logic, his laughing face. _Silly old Violet. _She thinks of her friends in fourth grade, the ones who laughed at her for believing in the Tooth Fairy. A few tears hit the table. She wipes them away.

"They're real?" she asks, and even though she's really crying now, she can't be bothered to stop it. "San—St. North? And—and all of them?"

There's a cold touch on the back of her hand. Frost. It curls up into a pattern, and then builds into a shape in the air: a castle, high in the air, curving and twisting in fantastical ways. It flickers into reality, for an instant, and then vanishes again when doubt clenches in her stomach. She reaches out to touch where it was, and rebuilds it with the force field. It's not perfect, but it's close.

"I want you to be real," Violet says. "I'd give anything to have that back."

When she looks up again, she sees the vaguest of outlines; a gangly boy, just like she thought he would be, with that stick propped up against his chair. He's perched on the very edge of it, as though he's waiting to take flight, one leg drawn up against his chest, the other left to dangle. For a breathless moment, he's only an outline; then something inside her breaks down, and turns into the child she was. She is no longer on the edge of believing. She does. He is not _maybe. _He is.

He turns solid slowly, achingly slowly, and even if she's not willing to believe in Santa Claus—_Nicholas St. North_, she corrects herself, almost absently now—she thinks she might believe in a boy named Jack Frost, because there he is, across her kitchen table, with winter-sharp eyes and hair that flickers with moonlight. He's only in a hoodie, and his feet are bare, but he looks more at home in the cold than she ever does in her supersuit.

"Then I'm real," he says, and he grins at her. He reaches forward, and his thumb is frighteningly cold against her cheek as he wipes the tears away. "For as long as you believe."

* * *

A/N:

A cheesy crossover Christmas ficlet. There'll be a few more parts, and they'll be coming up soon, because I'm writing fast.

Happy holidays, and I hope you enjoyed!


	2. The Second Night

**The Second Night**

It's always night when she sees him, and she comes to associate his hair with the glint of moonlight and starshine.

She's not sure what he does during the day. She's not sure if he does _anything_ during the day. All she knows is that when it hits twilight, and she goes back into her room to read or look out the window or draw, she finds him on her windowsill, waiting to be let in. She's not sure if this is regular for him, either; he's chatty, and smiling, and he tells wickedly sharp jokes, but there's a cautiousness to him that she recognizes from years of hiding her powers. He doesn't tell her everything, just like she doesn't tell him everything. All she knows—all that she _really _knows—is that there is a boy who flies to her windowsill in the evening, like a white-haired Peter Pan, who can make art with ice and draw snow onto her head, that for some strange, crazy, wonderful reason, she likes talking to.

He takes to leaving little gifts on her windowsill, when she finally crawls back into bed at two, three, four in the morning, later and later as they start talking for longer and longer. One morning she wakes up and finds a wildcat carved in ice. The next, she opens her window to find a little statue of a Christmas tree, complete with colored ornaments and even a little star. (That's Christmas Eve, and though she doesn't tell him, she wonders what he'll leave for Christmas Day.)

But the next morning she spends in the sewers, fighting off genetically enlarged rats, and when she gets back to her room, it's past midnight, and it's probably the worst Christmas Day she's ever had. _Including _the one when she stopped believing in Santa.

It takes a few days for him to come back. One morning, she wakes up long before dawn (from a nightmare, not any alarm) to find another ice sculpture, tiny, gorgeous, and disturbingly familiar. It's her, but it's not the her that she introduced to Jack Frost. It's the other her, the her in the supersuit, the one that she can never quite acknowledge without a mask on her face and gloves on her hands. The statue her is in the midst of casting a force field. There's a cocky twist to this Violet's mouth that she's never seen on her own lips, but somehow she's beautiful that way, and that makes her nervous. Violet decides to leave the sculpture on the outside sill—it would only melt if she brought it inside—but she takes a polaroid of it anyway. Then she says, to the empty room, "This could be considered harassment."

"Why?" Of course. She needs to remember to look up more often. Jack's sitting in the nearby tree, his legs dangling off a branch, stick braced across his lap. That devilish smile is back. "Are you feeling harassed?"

"Only a little." She smiles, and then winces when it pulls at a bruise on her cheek. Jack's grin disappears instantly, and before she realizes it he's on her sill, his fingers brushing against her face. It's the first time he's touched her since that first night, when he stole her tears, but his coldness hasn't changed. It's like being touched by an icicle. Violet flinches a bit, and he pulls away.

"Vi," he says, and he's never used her nickname before. For some reason it makes her ears go hot. "Vi, what happened?"

"I'm a super, but I'm not invincible." There's an edge to her voice that she didn't mean to put there. "I get bruised. I'm fine." She waits until he retreats a bit, takes his hand away from her bruise, before daring to meet his eyes again. The statue lies between them. "How did you find out? About…me."

He rubs the back of his neck. Suddenly he's awkward. She's never seen that on him before, and it makes her blink. "You…didn't come home last night. None of you did. So I looked around."

In spite of herself, a smile curves the edge of her mouth. Violet settles on her window-seat, and tucks her knees up under her chin. "Are you stalking me, Jack Frost?"

"No. Just…keeping a friendly eye, is all." Still, he looks embarrassed, and it's enough to make her smile go wider. When he sees her face, he shakes his head. "I don't…people aren't good at…seeing me. So I…"

Seeing. Believing. Seeing is believing. Abruptly she feels bad for teasing him. Still, it makes her nervous to think of him following her, so she leans forward, touches his wrist. "At least let me know if you're there, all right? And you don't have to worry about me. I can take care of myself."

He nods, drawing his knee up against his chest, and she withdraws again. She supposes she's friends with this strange, lonely boy, though she's not sure how that came about. She certainly believes, in him at least. She's not sure she could stop, now. A question strikes her, and she tilts her head. "How old are you, Jack?"

"I don't know." He's being honest. She can see that in his eyes. "It's been a long time since I thought about it. I think I was…eighteen. Last I checked, anyway. Before…" He plucks at his sweatshirt. "This, anyway."

"Oh." She doesn't want to ask what that means. Still, she thought he might have been younger. He doesn't act eighteen. He's younger and older than that, somehow. So much older. She really doesn't know that much about him, other than the barest details about what he is: a spirit of ice and snow. A Guardian, though she doesn't know what that means. It should be strange—she does think it's strange—but that doesn't change who he is. Violet clears her throat. "….why did you want me to believe?"

"I told you," he says. "You always have. You just needed a little push."

She waves that off. "But you could have been anywhere. Why were you outside my window? Why were you watching me?"

He shifts, very uncomfortable. She thinks she might see a tinge of pink in his cold skin. Still, she waits, implacable, until he finally answers. "I saw you. At the school, a few weeks ago. You looked…very invisible."

"I probably was," she says, but he shakes his head.

"I could see you. You just…nobody else did. And I…" Jack takes a deep breath, and lets it out. "Being invisible is…hard. That's all."

She could tell him, she thinks. Right now. She could tell him that she always used to be invisible. That even though she brightens and can smile and is no longer shy, sometimes she prefers to be invisible. But that's not what he needs to hear. Right now he's vulnerable, for the very first time since she's met him, and it makes her very nervous. So she scoops up a handful of snow from the sill and throws it at him, watches him sputter when it hits him in the cheek and the mouth and the eye. Then she smiles at him.

"Come on, Jack," she says, and stands, ignoring the way her bones creak and her ribs squawk at the movement. "Let's go on an adventure."

She bundles up, first, in her scarf and mittens and hat, over her jeans and sweatshirt and supersuit, which she always wears, now, close against her skin. She leaves a note for her parents depending on when they wake up. _Gone out with a friend, will be back before long._ It's true, even if it's not the whole truth. Besides, it's the only thing she can say without them thinking she's finally gone crazy. Jack's waiting for her on the stoop. He hasn't come into her house since that first night, she realizes, as she taps him on the back of her head with her hand and waits for him to get up. He hasn't intruded on her privacy any more than she lets him, and of course, the following. She'll have to install some rules about the following. He lifts his eyebrows, his eyes snapping with mischief.

"So?" he asks, and his grin is back. "Where to?"

It's the middle of the night, and she's feeling daring. She puts a force field around herself and lifts it into the air, until she's level with her window. Jack follows her, his feet tucked into the curve of his staff. "Catch me if you can," she says, and then she pours on the speed, using a trick she stole from Dash to send her field rocketing through the air like a bullet, making it narrower, more aerodynamic. She hears Jack whoop behind her, and she goes faster, until the sweat beads up on her forehead and it's impossible for her to see quite where she's going. It's dangerous—anyone could look up and see Miss Incredible shooting through the sky like a supersonic bullet—but she doesn't care. After all, it's not like anyone else can see Jack.

Metroville is shiny as an ornament this time of year, multicolored and bright as a candleflame. She rockets over the junior high, and then over the elementary school, blocks apart, and when she looks back Jack is catching up. Violet puts a field around her hand and seizes the nearest telephone pole, letting it spin her to the side, using gravity and centrifugal force to pull a sudden ninety-degree turn that shouldn't have really been possible by the laws of physics. She's heading for the park that her father always used to take her to, back when she was little enough to pout about sledding and snowmen. There's a little lake, too, and she touches down on the far bank, where no one goes, pulling her field in close against her skin to keep the heat close. Then she darts to a fir tree and starts to climb, because she can hear the whistle of the wind, and knows he's coming closer.

She's about twenty feet off the ground when he finally lands, still laughing hard. It's probably why it took him so long to catch up. She's fairly certain he'd never let her win in a race if she'd honestly challenged him to one. He's too competitive for that. Now it's just a game of hide and seek, and she knows Metroville better than he does. She knows this place better. Plus, thanks to her force fields—and she has to smile at this—she didn't even leave any footprints.

"So what do I get if I win?" He calls out to the clearing, and she grins. She hasn't played hide and seek since she was a very little girl. Violet gets to her feet on the tree branch, holding on to the trunk with one hand, and the creak of the bark makes him look up. There's a force field in her hand.

"You have to win first, ice boy," she says, and she throws the field, willing it to capture him. It does, and he smacks at the inside with his stick. He's still laughing.

"Not fair."

"So fair," she retorts, and then she snaps to invisibility and starts her flight again. She's a glowing purple figure, but now at least she's not quite so obvious, in her bright red snow jacket. She waits until she's about fifty feet ahead of him before she lets go of the field, because to be honest, it's not a game unless he chases her.

She's just not going to let him win.

* * *

Time moves on. She graduates high school. Dash enters it. It's the spring and then the summer before she goes to college, and she's looking through pamphlets, trying to decide where she might go. She's been accepted to a few—one right here in Metroville, and it's where her father wants her to go, for certain—but some days, it's all she can do to lock herself in her room and stare at the acceptance letters, and wonder what will happen to the Incredibles when she leaves. Their identities are secret, but the mysterious vanishing of Miss Incredible—of Incredigirl—isn't something that they can exactly hide, especially when monsters and bad guys keep creeping out of the woodwork like cockroaches.

If she leaves her parents, if she leaves her brothers, then what will happen the next time they get into a fight with a fire thrower? Or a machine gun? Her force fields are important, irreplaceable. Leaving them the way the world thinks she ought to—the way, in her deepest thoughts, she wants to—could doom them to certain death, and it's not something she ever wants to consider.

But criminology isn't a degree offered at Metroville U, and that's what she wants to do. It's absolutely what she wants to do. She hasn't told her parents that—her mother wants her go to into biology, while her dad doesn't mind what she does, as long as it's not dangerous—but it's the only thing she can imagine herself doing. Ever. In a way she wants to be like her dad's old friend. She wants to be like Gazerbeam, a lawyer, someone who put bad guys behind bars even without a mask. She wants to be more honest with her work, and even though Incredigirl is what the world needs right now—even with the Superhero Relocation Act still in significant power—the thought of joining the cops, of stopping bad guys who don't necessarily want to take over the world, is something that she can't shake out of her head.

Jack spots them on her desk one night, when she's disproportionately quiet and he's sitting on her sill, looking at the stars. There's not much for him to do in the summer months. He should, by all rights, be in the southern hemispheres, and he is most of the time now, but once a week or so she can always trust that there will be a little knock at her window and a pattern of ice on the glass. He looks at her for permission, and when she waves her hand in response, he floats down into her room and goes to her desk.

"What are these?"

"College. Acceptance letters." Problems. She doesn't say that, though. "I have to figure out where I'm going."

"You're moving?" His voice is quizzical, but his smile isn't. "That's kinda cool."

"If I move." She draws a bit of a design in the frost he's left behind him, curling ivy with leaves marked in with her pinky nail. "I was thinking about staying here."

"Why?" He's sorting through them now, looking at the names. She's left Eastern Michigan University on the bottom of the pile, with a bright blue post-it stuck to the front. _Criminology._ "There's nothing wrong with moving."

"I know." She makes a force field in her hand, and then lets it go, purple spiraling away into the night. "I just…I don't know."

He must hear the hesitation in her voice, because he looks at her out of the corner of his eye. He doesn't comment on it, though. He's found the post-it note. "Criminology? But you're a superhero."

"And superheroes can only do so much." She almost snaps it, but she reins herself in, just in time. Violet looks away from him. "Sorry. I just…I don't think I should go."

"But you want to." It's a question, not a statement. He settles on the sill opposite her again, swinging his legs in the summer air. When she doesn't answer, Jack turns to her, frowning. "Vi, if you want to go, then go. Don't feel guilty about it. It'll make you happy, right?"

"But my parents—" It bursts out of her before she can stop it. "I just…I'm Miss Incredible."

"I think you're the only person who calls yourself that, Vi," he says, his eyes twinkling, and she shoves him in the shoulder with her bare foot, scowling a bit.

"Better than Incredigirl."

"I dunno, I like Incredigirl."

"You're the one who's called Jack Frost," she retorts, and he laughs outright at that, a sound like cracking ice.

"Caught me there." The humor doesn't leave his eyes as he rubs his chin with one hand, looking at her with half a smile. "Vi, listen. I think you should go. It's what you wanna do, right? Your parents are kind of great people. They'd want you to go and do what'd make you happy, not try to keep you here all locked up in a box in order to preserve the team." He makes quotation marks around the words. "They'll be fine."

"I know." She draws an X through her ivy. "I just…If they get hurt while I'm gone, it'll be my fault. For leaving them. I'm important to the team, I keep us all safe. If Dash or Jack-Jack gets hurt because I'm not around, then I won't—"

Jack takes her wrist, and pulls her hand away from her ruined drawing. Violet looks at him, sharply, and thinks about shoving him off the sill, but then he lets go, and says, "Violet. They'll be fine. What sort of trouble could they get into in the four months you'll be gone, first semester?"

"You don't know my family," she grumbles, and pulls her knees up against her chest. Jack grins a bit.

"I don't know, you've described 'em pretty well, and I _am _invisible. Most of the time."

She scowls at him again, and he grins. Then the smile slips away, and he curls his hands around his staff, watching her carefully. "Violet, it's your life. Your family can take care of themselves. They've proved that, so many times. They'll be fine. And if they need you, they'll call, won't they?"

"Yes, but—"

"Your parents are the best in the business. Your brothers are old enough for you not to have to worry about them anymore. And—" he hesitates. "If you want me to, I could…keep an eye on them for you. I don't have a lot to do around here in the summer, anyway, and even though I'll have to wander around a bit I can still…look in, on occasion."

She stares at him. Swallows hard. "You'd do that?"

"We're friends, right?" He breezes along, before she can answer. "Besides, you should go and do something that makes you happy. I don't mind watching them, and even if they don't see me, I can…help out, at least a little. If it's necessary. I'm not useless, y'know."

"I know." Still, she kind of wants to cry. She looks at him, and gives him a wobbly smile. "Thanks, Jack. I'll…I'll think about it. But really. Thank you."

He nods, blows frost in her face, and then takes off, and for the first time in weeks, Violet goes to bed and smiles into her pillowcases.

Maybe college wouldn't be so tough after all.

* * *

A/N:

So this'll probably end up being a four- or five-parter. Two more to go~


	3. The Third Night

**The Third Night**

Michigan is much worse and much better than she ever expected. The university is huge; there are thousands of students here, hundreds of freshman, and her roommate takes one look at Violet, sniffs a bit, and then says something biting about not touching _her _mini-fridge. Violet's okay with that. She rather thinks that Ella Hardwicke is the sort of person who would have been drawn to Syndrome, once upon a time, and she doesn't want to make friends with people like that.

The basic freshman classes are horribly boring, too, but she jumps right in to her criminology classes, and there are people there who make _sense_. Her favorite teacher is Professor Keegan, who teaches a class on racial, cultural, and genetic minorities, and seems to have a very benevolent opinion towards supers in American culture. Violet beams at her first paper, which has a lower grade on it than anything she ever received in high school, but higher praise from Professor Keegan than any of the other students in the class get. She can live with a B if it means she gets a _well done_ written next to it. Especially if it's about supers.

Ella spends most of her time out of the dorm room, either partying or hanging out with friends or both, so Violet basically has the room to herself. She's on the fourth floor of her dormitory, and so she leaves the window open, at least a crack, to let Jack know it's safe to come in. On nights when Ella stays in—rare, but usually before big math tests—she shuts it, and he knows to stay away. There has been a time or two, though, when Ella comes in unexpectedly to find Violet talking to nothing. Vi's pretty sure her roommate thinks she's schizophrenic, but that's okay. It's not like she cares what Ella thinks about her.

She gets friends, too, and faster than she thought she would. She's never been very talkative, but the people she has classes with are, and soon she finds herself whisked away to study groups and coffee runs and just plain fun things. She and Carolyn—a fellow criminology major—wander around Ypsilanti, window-shopping, just having fun. She's fairly certain that Carolyn's the closest friend she's had since Kari. Other than Jack, of course.

Jack's her friend, she thinks, and sometimes she smiles at nothing, because she really didn't expect that to come out of a midnight visitor.

She doesn't think he quite gets her excitement over her classes. If there's anything Jack isn't, it's academic. Still, he sits and lets her explain about philosophy and government and law and he seems like he's interested, so she tells him about it when he asks. She asks him about what he does with his days, and he waves his hand, sending a spiral of snow through the air. He's been making snow days up in Canada and parts of Alaska, and it amazes her that he can be down in Chile one moment and be visiting her in Michigan the next.

"It's not like I teleport," he says, laughing, but he still moves much faster than anyone ought to be able to, considering the places he mentions so offhand, places she's been wanting to visit since she was a little child. India and Japan and Mongolia and South Africa and Switzerland and all sorts of places. "Anywhere that gets snow," he says, and so when she asks about the Sahara he pokes her with his stick and scowls.

"I'd melt."

She's not sure if he's serious, but the thought of him melting sends a shock of unexpected fear through her gut. She doesn't want him to melt.

He must see something in her face, because he smiles a bit, and nudges her again with a cold shoulder. "I wouldn't _actually _melt, Vi. I was joking."

"Stupid joke," she mutters in reply, but she nudges him back to let him know he's forgiven, and then she shoos him away. She has an eight AM calculus class, and that means she can't stay up later than two AM anymore. He doesn't seem to mind.

She even joins the gymnastics team at school, even though it means she's so exhausted by the end of the day that she can barely talk. She develops an addiction to coffee that probably isn't healthy, and somehow manages to get better at only working with three or four hours of sleep a night.

She should expect it, when it comes, but she doesn't. She's sitting at a café in town waiting for Carol when she hears someone scream, and hears the sound of running feet. Habit has her on her toes and down an alley a second later, and rationality keeps her from stripping her clothes off and running to join her family in fighting whatever's coming their way. She doesn't hesitate about putting her mask on, though, or pulling a beanie down over her long hair. She just makes sure to take off her EMU sweatshirt and hide it behind a dumpster before heading out to deal with it.

Whatever _it _is.

People are running the other way. She flickers to invisibility, wishing she was wearing her uniform, and forces her way through, ignoring the way people recoil from a moving set of clothes. If they notice. In the near distance she can hear sirens going off, and she aims for them, trying to follow. The baddie finds her first, though—a goliath of a man, tattoos lacing up his arms. He's wearing a mask, a dark uniform, a bow and arrow held tight in his ham-like hands. There are more of them, she can see them out of the corner of her eye, but he's the one that she takes on first, seizing his bow in both hands and diving between his legs, wrenching it out of his fingers. She flickers to visibility again, takes aim, and fires a force-field arrow. She manages to take out one of his partners—a monkey-tailed woman scaling a nearby wall—before she has to throw up a shield just as the first man tries to slam his fist into the back of her head.

There are twelve of them. The monkey-tailed woman is out of commission—another woman with broad wings is collecting her, flying out of range—but others, men and women, are on her then. There's a hiss, and then another man, whip-thin and long-fanged, rebounds off her force-field. A woman with stripes like a tiger across her face lunges, and scores a long gash in her field, something that's never happened before. Violet takes a breath, and drives the field as far away as possible, throwing them off her. They're all Chinese, she thinks, or some sort of Asian; they're all tattooed; they're all half-animal. Something flickers in the back of her mind about the Chinese Zodiac, but there's no time for that. She fires again, and the snake-tongued man goes down screaming.

"Vi!"

Ice slicks past her, sending the tiger-faced woman sliding down the street. She sees him out of the corner of her eye, casting his frost, and she's never seen him do this before, waving his staff and bringing snow out of a fine spring day. She can't help it; she beams, and flings a shield around him even though these people can't see him, because that's what you do when you work with someone. The crew of crooks start to swear, start to run. A good four of them get away, not to mention the rooster-woman and the woman with the simian tail. Still, a good half of them are tied up and left with a note by the time the police make it to the scene of the crime, and the bag of jewels they'd been trying to make off with had been frozen in a block of ice nearby.

_Compliments of the Aurora._

"Well, that was fun," Jack says, cackling, when they finally slow down. She ducks back into the alley she'd started in, and collapses against the wall, trying not to laugh. It's been a very long time since she's taken on any sort of bad guy on her own, not to mention actually succeeded. She's grouchy that half of them managed to get away, but with only one super and a talented but inexperienced ice spirit around, it's to be expected. Besides, villains with such flashy powers shouldn't be too hard to track down. She takes her mask off, flickers back to visibility, and grins at him, wildly.

"Why'd you show up?"

"I said I hang around here sometimes." He shrugs randomly. "It looked fun."

"Superhero stuff isn't _fun_."

"Then why're you laughing so hard?"

She scowls at him a bit, but she can't deny that he's right. Superhero work can be fun, if you work at it the right way. If you catch the right situation. She pulls her sweatshirt back on, checks her hand for scratches. Nothing. The bow she throws behind the dumpster for safekeeping. She'll come back and study it later.

They're back on the street before she remembers. "The Aurora?" Violet lifts her eyebrows. It had been Jack's idea, the new name. If people realized that this was where Incredigirl had vanished to, it wouldn't work out very well. But still. "I don't have anything to do with the aurora. That's…that has nothing to do with me."

Jack shrugs. "I don't know. Sometimes your eyes remind me of it. The aurora borealis."

She looks at him, blankly, for a moment. "You're joking."

"No, it's true." He hesitates, and then knocks her on the forehead, lightly, with one knuckle. "You'd better get back. Carol will be back soon."

With that, he flies away, and Violet puts the backs of her hands to her cheeks, wondering why her face is suddenly burning.

* * *

One night he wakes her by pounding on her window, hard, the way a hurricane wind would slam against the glass. It's a miracle Ella isn't sleeping here tonight, otherwise it would be an enormous problem. She jolts up out of bed. At the look on his face—panic, pure and simple, absolute terror—it's all she can do to scramble out of bed and open her window, letting him float down into her room with that grace he has even when he's flitting around like some sort of psychotic bumblebee. "Jack?"

"It's Jamie," he says, and it's a name she remembers, from a story he told her a few weeks ago. A boy named Jamie, one of his charges, one of the few others who believes in Jack Frost. "Jamie's—something's wrong and none of the other Guardians know what it is and it looks like—I don't know. Violet," he says, and he looks desperate. "Violet, something's wrong with him that we can't fix."

_What makes you think I can?_ she wants to ask, but she's the superhero, not him. So she nods, turns to her dresser, and yanks out her jeans. On second thought, she shoves her mask into her pocket. No sense in not being careful. "Give me a minute. And turn your back."

He turns, and she's dressed in seconds. When she's done, he holds his hands out to her.

"It's too far away to walk."

She doesn't hesitate. She lets him wrap her up in his arms and they dart out into the Michigan night.

They can't be flying for that long, but the world seems to vanish beneath them. Jamie's house is beautiful, in a homey sort of way. It has a nice yard, she thinks, as Jack settles on another windowsill, miles away from her college, and deposits her beside him. The window is already half open, but inside there's only darkness. No, she thinks, that's not quite true; there's a little flickering light, in the corner, and a shadow of a boy, maybe Dash's age, maybe younger, curled up against the wall. Jack looks at her, desperate, and shakes his head. Then he calls out, softly. "Jamie. I brought help."

The flash of light blinds her, leaves spots against her eyes, like the afterimage of a supernova. Then it dies again, just as fast, and she would wonder whether or not she'd seen it at all if Jack hadn't been blinking just as owlishly next to her. Then there's a voice, trembling, frightened. "Go away. I don't want to melt you, Jack."

She looks at Jack, sharply. Jamie's right; there's a patch of water on Jack's hoodie, as though it's leaking down through his hair. The icicles in his hair have gone to water. But Jack shakes his head. "I'm not that weak, Jamie. You can't melt me. Don't worry."

Jamie's voice goes higher. "_Don't come closer_!"

Violet touches Jack's shoulder. Then she calls out too, softly. "Jamie, I'm human. I can't melt. Can I come in?"

Jamie bolts up, and the light bursts out of him, from every pore of him. It would hurt if she hadn't been prepared for it, with the thickest shield she's made since fighting the Omnidroid. She's squinting, trying to see him through the blaze. She wonders if he's another spirit, like Jack, and then the truth hits her in the back of the head, like her brother does when he's particularly irritated with her.

_He's a super_.

"Jamie," she says, and she makes a pair of force field glasses, shielding her eyes from his light. She makes a pair for Jack too, and ignores his startled exclamation. "Jamie, I'm safe from you. All right? I'm coming in, now. Don't be afraid."

A super. It thrums in her, a truth, a devastation. A super, here, with no control and _so_ much fear. She can taste it on the air like a poison. She's never met another super, not around her own age. She, her parents, her brothers, and Lucius—those are the only people like her she knows. But now there's this boy, this terrified boy, curled up in the corner as the light builds in him again, and she crouches in front of him, ready to throw up a shield if she has to. She lifts the glasses, and makes herself smile. "Hi, Jamie. I'm Violet."

He looks at her. Then he looks at Jack. "You can—you can see—"

"She sees me, Jamie," says Jack, and there's a tone she's never heard in his voice before, a pride, a longing. "She believes. But," he adds, and there's sorrow now. "Only in me. Not in any of the others."

"But—" Jamie's face screws up. "But you're so _old_."

The light flashes out of him again. She throws up a force field, and it sinks into her shields, heat and a brightness that makes her eyes water. When she lowers her shield again, Jamie's staring at her with eyes the size of plates. Violet, more blasé than she feels, winks at him.

"Yeah, but I'm special, too."

She offers her hands. Jamie takes them. When she closes her eyes, he copies her. "You can control yourself, Jamie. I swear you can. This is a power, but it's part of you. It's like any other part of you. Like your hands, or your nose. Or your smile," she adds, and when she peeks, she sees a bit of a one on his lips. "You can't hurt Jack, and you definitely can't hurt me. You need a lot more practice before you can even try to hurt me," she adds flippantly. She thinks she might hear Jack laugh. "Now I need you to breathe, and control it."

"I've been _doing _that," he yelps, and she can feel the panic ratcheting up again. She squeezes his fingers, drawing him back to the now, because he really could hurt her, if he worries. If he panics.

"You don't have to think about controlling your hand, do you, before you get it to do something?" It's the only advice she can give him, the only thing that she has. She's not a good teacher. She never has been. But a superpower is something that only the wielder can control. It's something only the wielder can understand. It's not something that can really be taught. "This power is _you_, Jamie. It's not something that's outside of you that you have to think about. It's just something you _are_. And it's not bad. I swear to you, it's not bad. It's just you."

"But—"

The light flashes again. She doesn't quite get her shield up in time, and now she can feel it rustling through her hair, heat and speed and sound. It could burn her, if she's not careful. Jamie flinches, and she lets go of his hands, takes his face in her palms. "Jamie," she says, and he looks at her, wide-eyed. "Jamie, breathe. You'll be fine. You need to breathe. All right? Your friends, the ones I can't see and the one that I can, they're all here, right?"

Jamie glances over her shoulder. "Y-Yes."

"They think you can do it, right?"

"Y-Yes."

"Then you can do it. They're a lot smarter than I am, and I think you can too. So just breathe. All right?" She leans forward, puts her forehead against his. "Breathe, Jamie. Breathe. Breathe."

She keeps whispering it, over and over again, a force field layered close to her skin and another behind her, to protect Jack, even if he insists he doesn't need protecting, until she feels the light sink back into Jamie's skin, until he stops trembling, until he relaxes enough to put his arms around her and hide his face in her shoulder. She feels his breathing catch a few times, and lets him hide his face until he stops crying. Finally, she takes her shields down; finally, she feels Jack's feet touch the floor, his hand brush the back of her head. She pulls away from Jamie.

"You're all right?"

He nods. His eyes flicker up to Jack again, and then back to her. "I wish you could see the rest of them," he says, and it's the last thing she expected. "I wish you could see them."

She looks at the empty room, which is not as empty as she thinks, and nods. Tears fill her eyes.

"I wish I could see them, too."


End file.
